The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.41

c7.41

The question inevitably arises as to the nature of the system of Sāṃkhya taught in the epic. The view adopted by Garbe† is that the Sāṃkhya of the epic is merely a popularizing and contamination of the true Sāṃkhya, which he considers is of too individual a type to have been produced except as the creation of some one mind. As he holds that this ingenious system was in vogue before the rise of the epic, or at least before the epic took its present shape, it is natural that so important a philosophy should have left its traces unmistakeably in the epic, and equally natural that the form in which it appears should be one far removed from the precision and clarity of the true system. To this argument the most serious objection is the fact that there is no real evidence that the Sāṃkhya philosophy existed as a complete whole as early as the period of the epic, say 200 B.C. to 200 A.D., the evidence of the priority of such a system to Buddhism being, as has been seen above, far from cogent. Nor again is there really any sufficient ground to hold that the Sāṃkhya system is the bold and original product of a single mind. On the contrary, the system on close examination can be seen to be a somewhat illogical reduction of principles which are expressed in the Brahman philosophy of the Upaniṣads, and in opposition to the theory of a rapid development must be set the far more probable theory of slow growth, which can be traced through the later Upaniṣads, the *Kaṭha* and the *Śvetāśvatara*, which have clear traces of the doctrine of evolution of principles in the Sāṃkhya manner. Moreover if, as is supposed, the full Sāmkhya system was in existence before the epic, it is decidedly strange that the epic should practically ignore the doctrine of fine elements which that system has so clearly. On the other hand, the terminology applied in the Kārikā to these fine elements, and to the gross elements, the first being described as Viśeṣa, and the latter as Aviśeṣa, is decidedly unnatural and curious and contrasts sharply with the simple description of the gross elements and their characteristics, Viśeṣas, in the epic.